The allocation of customers to potential distribution centers in supply chain networks: GA and AIA approaches

In this paper, two stages of supply chain network; distribution centers (DCs) and customers, are considered. There are customers with particular demands and potential places which are candidate to be as distribution centers. Each of the potential DCs can ship to any of the customers. Two types of costs are considered; opening cost, assumed for opening a potential DC plus shipping cost per unit from DC to the customers. The proposed model selects some potential places as distribution centers in order to supply demands of all customers. In order to solve the given problem, two algorithms, genetic algorithm and artificial immune algorithm, are developed. The Taguchi experimental design method is applied to select the optimum parameters with the least possible number of experiments. For the purpose of performance evaluation of proposed algorithms, various problem sizes are utilized and the computational results of the algorithms are compared with each other. Finally, we investigate the impacts of the rise in the problem size on the performance of our algorithms. (C) 2010 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.